Grit and consequence

Abstract

Grit is implicated in several biological phenomena—it wears teeth, it fractures teeth, it drives tooth evolution, it elicits complex manual manipulations—any one of which could be described as a central topic in evolutionary anthropology. But what is grit? We hardly know because we tend to privilege the consequences of grit (it is abrasive) over its formal features, all but ignoring crucial variables such as mineral composition, material properties, and particle geometry (size, angularity), not to mention natural variation in the habitats of primates and their food surfaces. Few topics have animated so much debate and invited such cool indifference at the same time. Our goal here is to shine a light on grit, to put a philosophical lens on the nature of our discourse, and to call attention to large empirical voids that should be filled and folded into our understanding of primate natural history and evolution.